========================== C M U C L 19 f =============================

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 19f. This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and bugfixes from the 19e release.

CMUCL is a free, high performance implementation of the Common Lisp programming language which runs on most major Unix platforms. It mainly conforms to the ANSI Common Lisp standard. CMUCL provides a sophisticated native code compiler; a powerful foreign function interface; an implementation of CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, which includes multimethods and a metaobject protocol; a source-level debugger and code profiler; and an Emacs-like editor implemented in Common Lisp. CMUCL is maintained by a team of volunteers collaborating over the Internet, and is mostly in the public domain.

New in this release:

• Feature enhancements:
  • ~R supports many more cardinal names.
  • Updated network support:
    • Added BIND-INET-SOCKET to bind a socket to a local address.
    • Added OPEN-NETWORK-STREAM to create a stream connected to a given host.
    • Added ACCEPT-NETWORK-STREAM to create a stream connected to the new network connection
    • Updated CONNECT-TO-INET-SOCKET to allow binding the newly created socket to a local address
  • Added UNIX:UNIX-OPENPTY, an interface to the openpty C library function.
  • SSE2 support added for x86.
    • CMUCL automatically detects whether sse2 is supported or not and loads up the appropriate core file.
    • New -fpu switch allows the user to specify explicitly which core should be used. The valid values are x87, sse2, or auto (the default).
    • Fasls compiled with sse2 support have the extension sse2f. Otherwise, the normal x86f extension is used. This allows the user to do tests/experiments with both x87 and sse2 without having to mess around with different directories and removing fasls before building for a different FPU.
    • If the chip supports sse2, but CMUCL can't find the sse2 core, CMUCL will try to fall back to the x87 core. (This only happens if -fpu is auto.)
  • Command line parsing now recognizes the option "--". Everything after "--" is not subject to CMUCL's command line parsing, and everything after the "--" is placed in the new variable EXT:*COMMAND-LINE-APPLICATION-ARGUMENTS*.

• ANSI compliance fixes:
  • Fix bug in backquote printer. If the variable is @foo, we want to print ", @foo" not ",@foo". Similarly, for .foo, we want to print ", .foo" instead of ",.foo".
  • Fix merging of version in MAKE-PATHNAME. If the pathname name is given, the version is not affected by the version in the default pathname.
  • RENAME-FILE now creates defaulted-new-name from merging new-name with the original filespec. This is an incompatible change from the previous version which created defaulted-new-name from merging the new-name with the truename of filespec. Also, a logical pathname should be returned if new-name is a logical pathname.
  • Character names need to be a capital letter followed by lower case. Needed to match what ~:C does. (Found via ansi-tests).

• Bugfixes:
  • Compiler can now derive the rank of an array, even if the array is not simple.
  • Fix off-by-one bug in ~R which prevents printing numbers from 10⁶³ to 10^66-1. 10⁶³ is a vigintillion.
  • The compiler and interpreter should now handle slot-value the same. Previously, different results were returned for things like (slot-value foo :a).
  • UNIX-GETGRNAM is now defined for Darwin (x86 and ppc).
  • UNIX-GETPWUID is defined for all BSD systems.
  • Type-derivation for EXPT no longer causes errors in some situations. The computed bounds were of the wrong type for the resulting type specifier.
  • Pathname printer no longer produces an error for (MAKE-PATHNAME :HOST NIL :TYPE "foo"). It returns #P(:HOST NIL :TYPE "foo") now.
  • Type derivation for DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT arithmetic should be working. Previously, all arithmetic operations would just return DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT even though the compiler should have been able to figure out a tighter result.
  • When SCALE-FLOAT would underflow, it would always return 0f0, instead of a floating-point zero of the correct type.
  • Fix some issues in creating the debug arglist string when the arglist contains items that can't be printed readably.
  • DIRECTORY is now faster for directories with a large number of files.
  • RANDOM is now much faster on all platforms for numbers upto #xffffffff. This is an incompatible change from previous releases because the numbers produced may be different from before.
  • The small bias in RANDOM for integer args up to 32 bits long should now be gone.
  • Improved type derivation for LOGAND when one arg is bounded but the other is not.
  • Some issues with tracing on sparc and ppc have been fixed. This usually manifests itself with a segfault just after the function result is printed.
  • Fixed bug on sparc where C-c sometimes causes a segfault. We now handle the case where siginfo_t is NULL, which can also happen on other architectures.
  • The interpreter catches invalid EVAL-WHEN situations just like the compiler, instead of silently ignoring them.
  • FLOAT-PRECISION supports double-double floats.
  • Tracing should now be working on Darwin/x86. Previously, certain cases would cause Lisp to segfault in bad ways where you could not return to the repl. Do not need to do encapsulation by default anymore.
  • The bounds for type (REAL lo hi) are computed better now. The REAL type is a union of SINGLE-FLOAT, DOUBLE-FLOAT, and DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT. The computed bounds for DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT only had double-float accuracy if the bound for REAL was a rational.
  • The FLOAT type now requires that the bounds, if given, be floats. Previously, any real type would be accepted. This makes FLOAT behave like SINGLE-FLOAT and DOUBLE-FLOAT which required the bounds to be a float of the appropriate type.

• Trac Tickets:
  • #16: Read-time hash-table issue Fixed.
  • #17: LOOP NAMED NIL has no effect Fixed.
  • #18: Modular arith bug 1 Fixed
  • #19: Modular arith bug 2 Fixed by not doing modular arith if the args are known to be fixnums.
  • #20: Modular arith bug? Fixed via the fix for Trac #21. The original workaround has been removed.
  • #24: Float contagion for expt Float contagion is applied to the arguments before computing expt.
  • #21: Modular arith bug 3 Fixed by delaying the logand defoptimizer.
  • #15: x86 double-float issue Fixed when using SSE2 support. We will not fix this for x87.
  • #25: Compiler bug Fixed.
  • #26: slot-value type check Fixed for some cases. When used in methods, slot-value may not do the type check.if the object is not a argument to the method.
  • #29: make-condition doesn't accept class objects Fixed.

• Other changes:
  • IS1, IS2, IS3, and IS4 are recognized character names for the ASCII control codes US, RS, GS, FS, respectively.
  • Added OPEN-NETWORK-STREAM and ACCEPT-NETWORK-STREAM functions.
  • When initializing a random state, try to read 627 words from /dev/urandom to initialize the entire state vector with random bits. Previously, only one word was read.
  • A seed of 0 is allowed in KERNEL:INIT-RANDOM-STATE.
  • Updated User guide to include more examples of tracing.
  • Enable gencgc page protection on x86/darwin. This can speed up GC a bit. (Not measured.)
  • Bignum truncate is significantly faster. Some cl-bench benchmarks are now almost twice as fast.
  • The continuable error produced by raising an integer to a power exceeding *intexp-maximum-exponent* is now a restart, giving the user the option to continue and update the limit to the new power.
  • The Darwin/x86 port can run on Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

• Improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS:
  • The compiler and interpreter should handle SLOT-VALUE the same way. Previously, (SLOT-VALUE obj :a) would behave differently in the compiler and interpreter.
  • Some issues with GET-ACCESSOR-METHOD-FUNCTION and SLOT-VALUE-USING-CLASS have been fixed. GET-ACCESSOR-METHOD-FUNCTION was causing an error to be signaled incorrectly.
  • (SETF (SLOT-VALUE <OBJ> <SLOT>) <NEW>) will now signal an error in some situations when the new value is not of the correct declared type for slot.

• Changes to building procedure:
  • For Linux, custom CFLAGS, CC, and LDFLAGS are supported. Requested by Stelian Ionescu for Gentoo support.
  • The FreeBSD config file is now named Config.x86_freebsd, which is equivalent to Config.FreeBSD_gencgc, which is deprecated.
  • The Linux config file is now named Config.x86_linux, which is the equivalent to Config.linux_gencgc, which is deprecated.

• Known issues:
  • Executables (via save-lisp) on recent FreeBSD versions are currently not working. The executable is created, but the resulting executable doesn't work correctly.

This release is not binary compatible with code compiled using CMUCL 19e; you will need to recompile FASL files.

See <URL:http://www.cons.org/cmucl/> for download information, guidelines on reporting bugs, and mailing list details.

We hope you enjoy using this release of CMUCL!